


Drawn to the Blood

by aingeal



Series: Taking Care [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: A million warnings apply, Angst, Bruises, Bucky Barnes Trauma Angel, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Cutting, Hurt/...Hurt?, Hurt/Comfort, I'm going straight to Hell, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self Harm, Self-Mutilation, Steve cuts Bucky for him, Steve on Bucky violence, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Imagery, That's what this is about, This is even more messed up than the first one, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, catws, please don't read this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-25 03:01:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3794221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aingeal/pseuds/aingeal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky doesn't want to live, but he can't ask Steve to kill him.<br/>He needs him to do something else, though, because everything is unbearable, and only Steve can help him.</p><p>Please read the tags again and proceed at your own risk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drawn to the Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Sufjan Steven's ["Drawn to the Blood"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkkpHDX_Cvg) off his new album [_Carrie & Lowell_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsGODTySH0E&list=PL67VKSNJdY_XBvoFECHFKyesxnDhTVM8N) which I listened to a lot while writing this. "Drawn to the Blood" and ["The Only Thing"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adKEqin5SoI) in particular. I mean I don't _recommend_ listening to those when reading this, but if you really want to do a number on yourself- like I obviously do- then, yeah.
> 
> Again this contains really triggering content so please don't read it if you're feeling vulnerable.

“I can’t.” Bucky chokes out the words and as he does so his mouth becomes a quadrilateral, a trapezium with the bottom lip pulling out wide into corners again, and his eyes clench against a scalding melting feeling, everything of his eyes and his brow creasing up tight, and he coughs out something which is part word, part sob, “I can’t— I can’t— I can’t—”. They shake out of him, his chest spasming them out, and it feels like he can’t breathe. Every sobbed word breaks free from the constriction in his throat against its will, and his voice cracks, hisses, breaks around them. The hot tears in his eyes won’t fall, they just sit behind his scrunched lids and burn. His chest is all knotted up, getting tenser and tenser until he can’t even choke out the words anymore. He just judders out silent sobs like coughs. It’s not really crying. Crying would be a release. This is just winding him up tighter. The veins in his reddened neck and in his temples stand out as he works his jaw and his wide-open mouth, keening silently around the unspeakable thing in his chest.

The thing in his chest hurts so much, it hurts _so badly_. He doesn’t know to call it his heart, because he thinks he doesn’t have one, but it is his heart that is breaking. It’s breaking because he cannot ask Steve to kill him. He cannot choose to bring Steve’s death upon him as well as his own. He can’t kill Steve. He couldn't even kill him when he had no free will not to, so there is no way he can do it now he has a choice. And so he cannot have the death that has been offered to him. He hates Steve in this moment, hates him with the hatred of a parent for the police officer who brings them the news that their missing child’s corpse has been found. _How could you do this to me? How dare you bring me this news? How dare you snatch away all my hope? Get out of my house- get out get out get out get out._

Steve’s thighs over his pelvis, the weight of him pinning him to the floor, his huge hand on his wrist, they feel like they’re going to crush him into dust, but also like they’re not nearly heavy enough. He wishes Steve would release him/he craves more. He simultaneously tries to fight him off and pull him harder on to himself. He is incapable of asking for what he needs.

The pain in his chest and his physical frustration twist his wheezing, silent cries up into a piercing scream and as it rips from between his teeth he spasmodically moves his arm under Steve’s hand, and he raises his head and bangs it sharply down on the hard wood floor. He sees stars. He does it again. He sees red. Again. There’s a crunch. He raises his head once more-

But then there’s a hand tangling in the hair at the back of his head, heedlessly ripping through the knots in it so that chunks come away and leave an itchy pain in their place. There’s the sound, as Steve drops the pocketknife, of it skittering away over the floor to lie under the couch. The hand that had held it returns to Bucky’s throat, the thumb jammed against the bend in his jawbone by his ear, and the fingers sinking into his skin on the opposite side, the fingers so long that some are up on his cheekbone while others wrap all the way behind his ear. With this dual grip on the back of Bucky’s head and his neck and face Steve stops him from banging his head. He holds him like a vice.

Bucky screams and tries to thrash his head out of Steve’s grasp, but it’s futile. Steve holds on to him like he’s rescuing him from drowning. Bucky screams again, much louder and fuller this time, a scream that opens his chest and tears his throat, and makes Steve’s ears ring. It goes on for a long time. Steve’s fingers do not slacken.

There’s finally silence. Bucky’s run out of breath. His head swims, and his neck goes floppy, his head lolling in Steve’s hands.

Steve gently lays Bucky’s head on the floor, and he unmeshes his hand out from the tangle of his hair at his crown and cups it to the back of his neck. He slides his other hand from his jaw to his chest, placing it flat there. He can feel Bucky taking deep, deep breaths, and feel how hot his skin is beneath his top. Steve is glad that Bucky can breathe now. He carefully lowers himself onto him, stretching his own legs along the length of his, pressing their chests together, and placing his face to his neck. He wants to be close. His limbs need closeness. He needs to feel them both together, both of them alive. He initially supports himself with a palm flat on the ground and a bent elbow, his other arm still cradling Bucky’s shoulders and neck, but when he hears him groan he gradually shifts his weight more fully on top of him. Bucky’s groan comes again, long and deep, from the pit of his lungs, so Steve lets his entire considerable bodyweight crush him into the floor. It’s the least he can give him.

They lie like that until the blissful blankness of it in Bucky’s mind starts to break up and everything in his chest and head begins to feel agonising again. Steve’s weight on him is so good, but it’s not oblivion, and therefore it’s not enough. It’s run out. The weight is starting to steal his breath, but he doesn’t ask Steve to move. He is incapable of asking for what he needs; what he needs is death and he cannot ask Steve for that. He would lie there uncomplaining even if Steve never moved again. He imagines what it would be like if Steve had a heart attack like this and his heavy corpse just stayed on top of him. He wouldn’t be able to move it. He imagines eventually having to piss, beneath Steve’s corpse. He imagines what it would be like to have to stay underneath Steve’s decomposing corpse until he starved to death. He loves the word _corpse_. This imaginative flight is a distraction from the agony while it lasts, but inevitably he comes back to his body, and he can feel it all too harshly again. The crushing weight of Steve isn’t blanking him out at all now; it’s just making everything feel worse, making him too aware of his chest. The thing in his chest that hurts.

Steve- who through seventy years and two resurrections has never lost the heart-deep instinct he has for Bucky’s feelings and his needs- senses something change, and rolls off him. He stays by Bucky’s side, lying with one leg still flung over him and his arm still beneath the back of his neck. He touches Bucky’s face with his free hand, lightly playing his fingers into the soft hairs at his hairline.

Bucky stays lying flat on his back. With Steve’s weight off him he feels like he’s floating into the air, like in that game kids play where you push your hands into the pressure of another’s, and when they release you it feels like there’s a buoyant ball of air between your palms. His body feels like that, but his chest still feels like it’s made of lead. Molten lead. The weight of it and the heat of it and the pain of it feel like they’re flowing through his circulatory system, pumped into his limbs and his head by the corrupt unnameable organ he supposes is still in his ribcage somewhere.

He’s very aware of his inner arm, his soft inner elbow, his wrist. He can feel the veins in his wrist itching to be rent by a blade, aching to flood their hermetically sealed contents into the air. The molten lead of his pulse thuds through them, saying, kill this, kill it all, kill everything, kill yourself. On the other side he can feel the phantom-limb effect of the broken metal arm that constantly reminds him he should be put to death, if there’s any justice in this world. Between these two feelings it’s completely unbearable to be alive, still.

He raises his arm and stares at it. It’s still so pale, so clean. He remembers the feeling of utter desolation when he’d realised he was unable to slash at it like he needed to. The need is still there. The white smoothness is still nauseating. He looks at the blue tracery of his veins, looks at the way they rope raised above his skin as they twist up his forearm, so pop-able-, so slash-able-looking. There’s a very very fine gossamer tracery of thin whitening scars just below the butte of his palm where he’d managed to scratch at himself with the knife between his teeth. Scars despicably pale and feeble. He can sense that Steve is looking at them too. He feels ashamed- ashamed that they are there in the first place, because he knows his love, his Steve, finds them heartbreaking, and he never meant to break his heart. But he’s also ashamed that they’re so pathetic. They should be deep purple and laddering up him, cross-hatched and wretched. Or they should not be there at all. They should have been cuts that never got to heal and scar, should have been death wounds that burned away in a crematorium and scattered into the air as ashes. There should be nothing left of him.

His hand starts to shake and he starts to wheeze and his brow crinkles up and sobs come out of his throat- softer, weaker versions of his earlier ones- and tears slide reluctantly, almost greasily, down from his eyes into his ears. He lies there crying weakly with his hand still held up in front of his face. It’s just unbearable. He doesn’t know what to do.

“Oh, my darling,” Steve whispers, his eyes soft with sadness and almost unfocused in their bleakness. He lifts his hand and wraps it around Bucky’s wrist, gripping with his fingertips in-between the complex cords of his tendons and veins, feeling his pulse.

At this Bucky’s eyes shudder closed. Something in him lets go. Tears slide faster from beneath his eyelids, which look thick with sorrow. He relaxes his arm, lets Steve hold it up in the air for him. He turns his head and presses his nose into Steve’s shoulder, into the soft cotton of his jersey and his muscle beneath it, breathing deeply.

Steve nods, in encouragement, and pushes his nose into Bucky’s hair. He holds on tight to his wrist. “That’s it, my boy. Let me,” he whispers, though exactly what it is he wants Bucky to let him do, he isn’t sure.

Bucky snuffles something into his shoulder.

“What’s that, darling? I can’t hear-”

Bucky speaks over him, his voice harsher than he means it to be; he’s not mad at Steve, it’s just hard to get his throat to form the words and get his lips and tongue to push them out, so they come out sounding angry. It’s so hard to ask for what he needs. “’Said, harder.”

“Harder?” Steve frowns against Bucky’s hair. Bucky can hear the rustle of it. “You mean- harder, like this?”

He experimentally squeezes Bucky’s wrist with his fingers.

Bucky nods vigorously and hisses.

Steve briefly gets a flash of a memory from when they were teenagers and discovering each other’s bodies for the first time, like shipwrecked sailors on a treasure-strewn shore, and they had taken it in turns to squeeze each other’s wrists or bite each other’s biceps, testing how far they could go, constantly asking, “Does this hurt? What about this? Shall I stop?” They had both been macho in their attempts to endure more than the other, egging the other on, but each of them would always stop before causing real pain. Then (so long ago) they had not wanted to hurt one another.

Steve still doesn’t want to hurt Bucky. But he had offered to kill him. He would have done it. He’s glad he didn’t have to in the end, but he would’ve done it, and then he would have followed him, close on his heels into the dark. He doesn’t think he would be able to explain it to anyone, but inside himself he understands that whatever pain he gives to Bucky, it will never be greater than that he already bears within him every minute of his waking life. And maybe the pain that Steve can give him could be sweet, in its difference from _that_ pain. Maybe it could be balm, be comfort, be absolution. It’s worth a try. And if Bucky lets him, then that means he’s not doing it to himself, isn’t turning in on himself, destroying himself. Steve doesn’t want to hurt him, but he wants to save him more than anything, and if saving him means hurting him, then— well.

He squeezes Bucky’s wrist really hard.

He is so strong. He can feel Bucky’s skin constricting against the bones, feel the bones shift, feel the complicated insides of his wrist giving way beneath the force of his big fingers. His fingernails make red half-moons in his skin.

Bucky chokes on a little whimper and nods more, frantically, and turns his face further into Steve’s shoulder.

Steve releases the pressure, then squeezes again just as hard. Then he shifts his grip and gropes his way up Bucky’s arm, squeezing as hard as he thinks is safe, all the way up, squeezing and pausing and moving, leaving him peppered with fingernail marks, until he has his hand round his elbow and all his digits crush into its bend, grating against the beginning of Bucky’s bicep and making it feel like his skin might burst beneath them. This will bruise.

“How’s that, love?” Steve asks. He’s a little scared.

Bucky grunts, voice strained, “Good. It’s good, Steve.” Then his voice goes whispery, embarrassed, “But Steve- Steve-”

Steve panics. He’s gone too far. He loosens his grip immediately until he’s just holding up Bucky’s arm, loosely cradled in his palm. He throws it a glance and his stomach churns to see the little red crescents and blooming bruises he’s caused. Oh god. “What is it? Bucky? Shall I stop-? Oh my god, I’m sorry-”

But at this Bucky _wails_. “No, no, no, don’t stop, please don’t stop, don’t stop Steve. I was going to, I was going to say—” he gulps, works his tongue, tries to find it in himself to say it. “’Was gonna say,” another gulp, “I need more. ‘S not enough. I don’t want to ask you, oh, I’m sorry, but—” He can’t continue.

Then he suddenly thinks of a way he can ask Steve without words. He’s not sure Steve will do it. But Steve had seemed to know just what he needed, had squeezed his wrist so good, so hard, right there where it needed it, where it felt like it was going to fall apart, where it felt like it needed to be shredded. He hadn’t even had to ask him. He’d just done it. And done it hard. And earlier he had pinned him down and drawn out his blade and offered to kill him. So if Steve had it in him to kill him, then Bucky thinks he might have it in him to do this- this thing he wants.

He looses his arm from Steve’s hand and rolls over and leans across him, dragging his metal arm, groping with his flesh hand. He rummages under the sofa they’re lying on the floor beside until his fingers touch it. The pocketknife. He tugs it towards him with the tips of his fingers, and then he can grasp it. He picks it up and crawls back to Steve’s side. He kneels next to him. He holds the pocketknife in his hand, in his lap. His head is bowed, he hides behind his hair. Bucky opens his fingers and proffers the knife towards Steve, just a small movement of his hand. He shuts his eyes. He doesn’t want to see what his reaction will be.

He holds his breath.

He hears and senses Steve get up, come close to him and settle there.

He feels his fingers against his palm, taking up the knife.

He hears the _shnick_ of the blade being unfolded from its handle.

He starts to tremble.

Steve places a hand on his shoulder, his wrecked shoulder, above the metal arm.

Steve leans close to his head, his eyes in his hair, his lips to his ear.

Steve whispers, “Where.”

Bucky’s shoulders shake, just once, from an uncontrollable tremor. He lets his breath go in a shudder. He keeps his eyes shut. He raises his arm. He extends it, bending his wrist, stretching out his inner arm, offering it to him.

He holds his breath again.

He feels Steve nod against his head, move his hand from his shoulder, wrap it once more around his wrist.

Steve pulls his wrist, making it bend back further, making his arm a better angle, making it burn from the stretch.

Steve pauses for only two heartbeats before he takes the knife to Bucky’s skin. He runs the blade smoothly and firmly in a slightly curving line across the broadest part of Bucky’s lower arm, just beneath his elbow. It sweeps like the bow of a violin. It raises an instantaneous ribbon of red. Steve lays Bucky’s arm down so it rests against his leg, relaxed, but he doesn’t let go of his wrist. Bucky’s blood dribbles to each side of his arm, onto his trousers. It trails down the length of his arm, hitting Steve’s thumb and splitting round it like a river tributary meeting a rock.

Bucky has his eyes closed. He felt the cut going through him like the crescendo of a soaring harmony. His head has gone like static. He leans into Steve, his head falling to his chest. His body is between Steve’s knees.

Steve drops the knife and wraps his arm round Bucky, holding him upright against him. He keeps tight hold of his wrist.

Steve looks through Bucky’s hair at his arm. He grits his teeth as he watches the blood stream merrily, making a mess of both of them. It’s so red, so bright, so hot. He feels it flowing on his thumb, the back of his hand. The hand that held the knife feels cramped, as if the knife is still within it. He forces a sigh into his lungs, trying to pull some composure in with it. He feels dizzy. Bucky is a slumped weight against him, hot and heavy.

And wet. He realises his chest is becoming soaked. Bucky is crying silently into him, turning a patch of the light grey jersey dark.

“I love you,” Steve whispers into his hair. “I love you.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Bucky murmurs almost inaudibly into his chest.

He sounds like he’s barely there.

The blood continues to flow.

 

 

It’s late at night now. Steve had uncovered the first aid kit he knew he brought for a reason and used the wound washing wipes in it, and carefully applied the small fiddly paper steristrips, using them to hold the edges of Bucky’s cut together; it was deep and hadn’t wanted to stop bleeding. Then he’d placed a gauze pad atop the wound, and wound a length of bandage round and round Bucky’s arm to keep it in place. Bucky had let him do all this without moving, without a murmur, just lying on the floor like he was drunk. All the time Steve had been tending to Bucky his heart had been pounding faster and faster and his stomach had become more and more knotted. Bucky was terrifying him.

He’s still terrified. They’re in bed in the darkness. He’d lifted Bucky and helped him stand and guided his shuffling steps into the bedroom and laid him down in bed and got in next to him and covered them over. Bucky lies heavily on his stomach, his face pressed into the pillow. His eyes are half closed like a dreaming dog. Steve lies looking at him for a long time. He can’t tell if he’s asleep or not. He’s so scared.

He eventually dozes off into a confused half-sleep, filled with visions of the red star from Bucky’s metal arm (a bizarrely decorative little flourish that had horrified him for some indefinable reason when he’d first seen it). He half-dreams, half-remembers the time they had fought among the cars on the highway, the time they’d fought on the heli-carrier. He dreams of Bucky’s eyes recognizing him. The metal arm glints through the dreams, its red star blinking like an airplane light. He dreams Bucky has his metal hand around his throat again. He dreams of the hole in the metal hand. He dreams Bucky has his shield. He dreams the red star again, and he dreams of the white star that decorates his shield, his uniform. He dreams concentric circles and red and white stars. Then he dreams a star carved into flesh, a vivid image- he can see the lips of the cuts where they peel outwards, see where the lines intersect to form the crude shape, see the blood dark black in their centers and streaming red on the skin, see the skin flushed harsh pink in pain.

He wakes with a start with the image still floating in front of his eyes. His heart is hammering. He’s sweating. He’s panicked. The dream was of Bucky, he’s panicked about Bucky; he turns to Bucky, to be reassured that it was just a dream, that he’s sleeping soundly next to him—

But Bucky is not in the bed.

Steve’s panic rises with his gorge and fills him with dark terror. He flails out from under the sheets, eyes desperately noticing where they’re tossed back from where Bucky has left them, seeing the sickening empty space where Bucky should be. He staggers off the bed, to the doorway, banging into it before hurtling down the corridor like he’s on a ship in high seas, ricocheting off the walls and not noticing when he smacks his knee hard on a piece of furniture in his way. The house is not very familiar to him yet and it’s dark and he doesn't know where Bucky is and for a moment he’s disorientated and he starts to really panic, suffocating, but he stops and rams the heels of his hands into his eyesockets and forces himself to breathe, like Sam Wilson had taught him to do, when he learned that Steve has panic attacks.

He forces himself to breathe and his lungs fill and the oxygen makes it to his brain so he can think. He thinks, _bathroom_. The house is a single-story and the bathroom is on the other side of it from the bedrooms, past the living room. The bathroom has an outside door, it’s designed for families with little kids to come in off the beach into, or for surfers to rinse their wetsuits off in. He runs there. Why is it so far away. Why had he fallen asleep. Why was he so _stupid_. Images flash through his head; a wrist dangling its hand over the edge of the bathtub, a crimson tide on the porcelain, or bare feet swinging from the shower curtain rail in the darkened room. These are the visions that have haunted and terrified him and that he’s tried to prevent coming true the whole time he’s stayed here with Bucky, and they seem so inevitable, and that’s why he’d known to head straight for the bathroom.

He’s made it there. The door is closed. A strip of light beams out from underneath it. Steve judders to a halt and pauses, touches his eyes again. He feels as he bends them that his elbows are trembling, weak with adrenaline and fear.

He opens the door.

The overhead light is obscenely harsh after the soft darkness of the rest of the house.

Bucky is not dead lying in the bathtub or strung from the ceiling. The relief strikes Steve in the chest, makes his heart kick.

Bucky is sitting with his back to the bathtub, curled in over himself, his hair concealing his face, which is bent to his drawn-up knees. His arm is around them.

The neat bandages that Steve had put on him are lying in a stained tangle on the floor. Bucky must have torn them off with his teeth. The cut has bled some more.

Steve goes to him, kneels beside him.

Bucky has the pocketknife in his hand. The blade is free from the handle, and he is holding it by the blade, holding it tight. His hand looks cramped around it, like he could never let it go. Blood has dried in a crust between his fingers and in a trailing stain down his wrist.

Steve sobs and shakes his head and shuts his eyes and lifts his face as if he’s praying for mercy. Then he gently pries the knife from Bucky’s fingers. Bucky lets him. Steve sobs again as he looks at the palm of his hand, the deep wound in its center, the dried blood on the blade. He holds Bucky’s hand in both of his own, cradling it, not knowing what to do. He bends his forehead to it like it’s a sacred object, and he cries.

“What are we going to do, baby?” He says between his tears. “What are we going to do?”

Bucky turns his head towards Steve, licking his dry lips. “I need it.” He says, wearily, his eyes only half-open. He is so tired. “I’m sorry Steve but I just need it.” He moves his arm. “I can’t do it myself, I tried…” He flexes his palm. “Tried. Can’t do it myself.”

Steve’s face crumples in suffering and grief. He wishes Bucky had got to die when he fell off the train. He wants to find every single person who was responsible for doing this to his Bucky and make them suffer, give them as much suffering as they have given his love. No, he doesn’t really want that. Multiplying suffering can never nullify suffering. He just wants justice. He wants Hydra to be destroyed forever. He wants Bucky to get to be better. He wants him to be ok. He loves him so much. He thinks of what he used to be like before, before he was the winter soldier. That brave boy was never ever ever supposed to have ended up like this. Steve’s tears flow fast and he presses a kiss to the side of Bucky’s forehead, wishing that small tenderness could do some work of healing.

Bucky doesn’t look at him. He just looks at his arm, at the vast swath of pristine skin bookended by the wounds at his palm and the crook of his elbow.

Steve sees what he’s looking at. His head spins, because he knows what he has to do. If he wants to help him, he has to do it. He doesn’t want to. He thinks it would almost have been easier to kill Bucky than do this. But he says it. He says, “You need— to be cut? More?”

Bucky nods, rolls his head back, parts his lips. He face is a picture of fatigue and a suffering sick desire. He takes in a shuddering breath and says flatly, “Please do it to me, Steve. Just do it to me. I need you.”

 Steve’s face crumples again. Bucky’s words are the same words he would have used, in a different time and place, in a different context, when he was asking Steve for something else. Something hot and good and healthy and happy. He hates hearing him use them to ask for this awful other thing, hearing them spoken in such a different tone, broken and bleak instead of breathy and kindled. He hates all of this. But he nods. He nods and he picks up the knife.

He nods and picks up the knife and without saying anything and without pausing he cuts him. He wields the knife like a paintbrush or like he’s a printmaker and Bucky is the lino, the woodblock. The knife is so sharp it just glides effortlessly as it parts his skin. He cuts him in parallel long horizontals one two three four five between his elbow and his wrist. He makes more, littler cuts between them. He takes his arm and turns it over and cuts harsher, rippling, scrappy cuts on the rougher skin on the back of it there. He tugs the sleeve of Bucky’s tshirt up and tries to get it to stay pushed up on his shoulder, but when that doesn’t work he just pulls the whole tshirt off so Bucky is topless, struggling a little to pull it down off the metal arm.

The whole time Bucky has been lying with his head tipped back against the bathtub and his eyes shut, taking it, but when Steve takes his top off he finds his eyes and holds them, eyes wide and piercingly crystal and containing the darkest love. Steve holds his gaze, his own eyes heartbroken and so blue. They don’t look away from each other as Steve works the knife on Bucky’s upper arm. He works away at it, and then he carves a star there. He carves a star so large and deep, a replica of the one on the metal arm. Bucky finally gasps in pain and looks away from Steve, up at the ceiling, and tears stream down his face.

Hearing Bucky’s sound of pain makes the momentum that had sustained Steve, allowed him to do this, suddenly die. He drops the knife. He retches. He looks at what he has done. He sees blood running in all directions, spattered everywhere, sees Bucky’s arm totally mutilated, sees the blood throbbing out from the carved star. He retches again and clutches his head, because the top of it feels like it’s going to come off. His hands are covered in blood. He gets it in his hair. He retches a third time and this time he actually does throw up, just a little, to one side. He feels sick to his stomach. He is shaking with desolation. He starts to cry like a little child, big helpless noisy sobs of pure anguish. He squeezes his face with his hands, blood and snot and tears sliding on his cheeks. He sobs out, “No, no _no_ , no no no, fuck- _fuck, NO,”_ and for the second time in his life he feels that it’s unbearable to be alive.

But Bucky is calm. Bucky’s eyes are red and still streaming with tears, and his arm throbs and throbs with all the cuts, and his blood is everywhere, but his face is still and peaceful, wearing a little smile. He can’t remember the last time he smiled. He lifts his arm and holds the back of Steve’s head, smearing blood on his cheek and his neck and his shoulder. He pulls Steve’s head towards him. Steve comes to him, presses his face into his neck, still whispering _no_ over and over again, as if that could negate what he’s done.

Bucky holds him and says, “Shh, shh. Hush, Steve, it’s ok. Steve? Listen to me. Stevie. It’s ok. It’s ok. Thank you, Steve. Thank you so much. I love you too. I love you too. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You’re so brave, Steve, you’re so brave and generous and good to me, you give me exactly what I need. Don’t worry. Don’t cry. It’s good. It’s ok. Don’t cry, Steve. It’s _good_ , Steve. My dearest. You are good. You are so good. I love you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Steve carries on crying but he nods and wraps his arms tight around him and they hold each other and stay there under the harsh light in the mess of blood and vomit, and Steve cries, and Bucky bleeds. And they are together, and they are alive. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate ending if you need something nice after that:
> 
> After a while they go back to the city and Steve finds Bucky the best psychiatrist in New York and makes the government pay for her as part of Bucky’s reparations as the victim of a War Crime. And one day he and Bucky go to Avengers Tower, and Tony does fix the metal arm. It’s not quite the same as before, it’s not as strong, and sometimes it cuts out, but it’s not a dead weight any more. Bucky can hold Steve’s hand with it. Tony gets out the paints he uses to touch up his automobiles and paints a white star over the red one on the metal, and paints a blue circle behind it, and then a white circle and two red ones around it, and so now Bucky can wear Steve’s star there too, wear it proudly on both of his arms.


End file.
